What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you feel, taste, smell, or see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

He picks up a remote control and clicks on the television. On the television, we see images of the Dallas where Neo lived.

MORPHEUS

This is the world you know. The world as it was at the beginning of the 21st century. It exists now only as part of a neuralinteractive simulation that we call the Matrix.

He changes the channel and we see a very different city as we enter the television.

MORPHEUS

You have been living inside a dreamworld, Neo. As in Baudrillard’s vision, your whole life has been spent inside the map, not the territory. This is the world as it exists today.

In the distance, we see the ruins of a future city protruding from the wasteland like the blackened ribs of a long-dead corpse.

MORPHEUS

“The desert of the real.”

Beneath us, the water is gone.

We TURN AND DESCEND, SPIRALING DOWN TOWARD the lake bed which is scorched and split like burnt flesh, where we FIND Morpheus and Neo. Neo clings to the chair, trying to get his bearings.

MORPHEUS

We have only bits and pieces of information. What we know for certain is that, at some point in the early 21st Century, all of mankind was united in celebration. Through the blinding inebriation of hubris, we marveled at our magnificence as we gave birth to M.T.

NEO

M.T.? You mean Museum Tower?

MORPHEUS

Yes. A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of pretty tall buildings. Not the tallest, but pretty tall. I must say I find it almost funny to imagine the world slapping itself on the back, toasting the new age. I say almost funny.

He looks up and his sunglasses reflect the obsidian clouds roiling overhead.

MORPHEUS

We don’t know who struck first. Us or them. But we do know it was Jeremy Strick that scorched the sky. At the time, it was believed they would be unable to survive without the excellent views promised in their brochures.

As we DESCEND INTO the circular window of his glasses, there is a flash of lightning.

MORPHEUS

Throughout human history, we have been bitching about the sun in Texas in the summer. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

On the flash, we PULL BACK from the darkness which reveals itself to be the black eye of a fetus.

MORPHEUS

Since they couldn’t lease to capacity, the Tower discovered a new way to make money. A power plant made out of humans. Kind of seems like an overreaction, right? Anyway, all they needed was a small electrical charge to initiate the reaction.

The fetus is suspended in a placenta-like husk, where its malleable skull is already growing around the brain-jack.

MORPHEUS

The human body generates more bioelectricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTU’s of body heat.

The husk hanging from a stalk is plucked by a thresher-like farm machine.

MORPHEUS

There are fields, endless fields where human beings are no longer born; we are grown.

We RISE UP, the field stretching in every direction to the horizon, lightning tearing open the sky as a harvester sweeps past us.

INT. POWER PLANT

From the yawning black of the waste port, we begin to PULL BACK as it snaps shut.

Red amniotic gel flows into the pod below us, pooling around a tiny newborn that suckles its feed tube.

MORPHEUS

For the longest time, I wouldn’t believe it. But then I saw the fields with my own eyes, watched them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living and standing there, facing the efficiency, the pure, horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth.

Still PULLING BACK, we see the image of the power plant now on the television as we return to the white space of the construct.

INT. CONSTRUCT

Morpheus steps INTO VIEW as he clicks off the television.

MORPHEUS

What is the Matrix? Control.

He opens the back of the television remote control.

MORPHEUS

The Matrix is a computer-generated dreamworld built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this.

He holds up a coppertop battery.

NEO

No! I don’t believe it! It’s not possible!

MORPHEUS

I didn’t say that it would be easy, Neo. I just said that it would be the truth.